Cheap blu-ray playback software

Johnmcl7

I've had a look around but there doesn't seem to be much in the choice of blu-ray software and certainly not cheap so I'm wondering if I'm missing any suitable options. Windvd Pro seems to get a lot of praise but £43 is a lot of money given some entire players are less than that and ideally I'd like the software for three machines.

Any recommendations?
John

bluesnake

tried vlc player?

Johnmcl7

Yes, but never had any luck getting it to work with blu-rays which is no surprise as I find it can be problematic getting retail software to play back the discs at times.

John

bengalknights

VLC with the right codecs and updates should work fine, also try MPC-HC again with the right codecs should work fine to.

bluesnake

version released about 10 days ago
vlc 2.0.4 introduces an important number of fixes and improvements for all playback, notably for Blu-Ray, DVD, HLS, Ogg and MKV files; but also for Youtube, Vimeo, Koreus and Soundcloud.

S0litaire

VLC does not work with Blu-ray's encoded using BD+ (which probably includes all the Blu-Ray disks released in the past 12-18 months) I've tried!

So I just bit the bullet and picked up a copy of "ArcSoft Total Media Theatre 5"

Johnmcl7

It is new discs I've been trying to playback, how much did you get the software for? Looking at their site it's listed at a rather hefty $100 but I appreciate it may be cheaper elsewhere.

John

S0litaire

I had to get it at the $100 (£62) price!
Looks like ArcSoft doesn't do discounts unfortunately

You might try Cyberlink PowerDVD it's £20 cheaper but I found it to be a bit bloaty and slow on my low power system

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cyberlink-PowerDVD-11-Ultra-PC/dp/B004XV2JNI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351433433&sr=8-1

Johnmcl7

Windvd is a bit cheaper than that and works better than Powerdvd but it's still expensive particularly for several machines.

John

S0litaire

Only thing I can think of is buying a +1Tb drive and designating the fastest of the PC's as a media server.

Use google to find available tools to "rip" the Blu-ray's to the drive and remove the DRM, then you can stream the movies to VLC or any other media player you like...

bluesnake

We keep telling you vlc but you do not want to listen
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=96787&start=60